Manuela Canestrini was born in Bolzano, Italy, in 1995. In 2023, she started as a project assistant in the Geoinformation Research Group at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). Manuela received both her master’s and bachelor’s degree in Geodesy and Geoinformation from the TU Wien in 2023 and 2019, respectively.

For her bachelor thesis, she worked on a datafusion of geospatial semantics and remotely sensed imagery for landcover classification, using a deep neural network. Her master thesis dealt with the analysis of the street networks of Vienna, Mexico City and Djibouti City. The main objective was to investigate the relationship between different properties of the street network (e.g. number of intersections, centrality measures, etc.) and the navigation success of pedestrians.

During her studies, she was employed as student staff at the Engineering Geodesy Research Group (TU Wien), where she worked on Indoor Positioning with smartphone IMUs.

Her current research interests lie in Urban Computing, Volunteered Geographic Information and Mobility Analysis.